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- Silicon Valley Has Lost Its Biggest Advantage
The AI boom has showered some of the nation’s most prominent companies in market value. OpenAI and Anthropic are now the two most valuable private companies in the world. Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia have become larger than ever. But among the biggest winners has been Caterpillar, a purveyor of yellow trucks and cranes. Caterpillar’s stock has more than doubled in value over the past year, making the company worth six times as much as Nike. Its ascent has little to do with the construction vehicles (both real and toy) that it is known for. Instead, Caterpillar’s success comes from its giant gas-powered engines that are helping power the nation’s data-center build-out.For all the attention given to improving model capabilities, the most important inputs to AI are not bits but atoms and electrons. To train and run its models, the AI industry needs to build. Data centers are incredibly complex technological and industrial operations—they require tech companies to erect power plants, build wastewater facilities, and set up all manner of electrical equipment, power lines, and advanced-cooling equipment. That calls for concrete, steel, silicon, glass, copper, and liquefied natural gas.This data-center construction has long been frenzied, but now it is fast approaching an inflection point that is both awesome and alarming. The major players—Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle—are on track to spend more on data centers by the end of the year than they bring in from their operations. That means tech giants whose non-chatbot businesses bring in tens of billions of dollars every year will likely need to take on debt to keep paying for their AI ambitions. From the launch of ChatGPT, in late 2022, through the end of last year, these firms’ capital expenditures—most of which go toward data centers—well exceeded half a trillion dollars. The companies intend to spend a similar amount in 2026 alone. And next year, their AI investments will likely exceed $1.1 trillion, according to a recent report from J.P. Morgan.[Read: Inside the dirty, dystopian world of AI data centers]Silicon Valley has long enjoyed a straightforward advantage: Its products and services cost relatively little to make but generate tremendous revenues. But operating a data center is in many ways more like running a steel mill than a smartphone app. In particular, data centers require stunning amounts of electricity, especially as AI models have gotten more powerful. Five years ago, a standard data center might… [TheTopNews] Read More.6 days ago - The Truth About AI’s Water UseUpdated at 3:41 p.m. ET on July 16, 2026There are two competing schools of thought over just how water-intensive AI is. In one, the technology is horribly thirsty. Data centers will exacerbate droughts throughout the country and “drain the great lakes,” as one popular Reddit thread puts it. The former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has taken up the issue, sarcastically posting at one point: “How dare the peasants complain about data centers stealing their water and driving the cost of electricity!!”The other school, populated by Silicon Valley types, holds that “The Data Center Water Crisis Isn’t Real,” as an article in the right-wing publication Pirate Wires argued in December. The issue with water “is totally fake,” “insane,” and has “no connection to reality,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said a few months ago.As with so many debates around AI, the arguments are not always presented in good faith. But unlike, say, the ambiguities over how much work a chatbot can or should be trusted to do, water use seems like it should be measurable, with clear facts supporting one side or the other. That is not the case. Does AI waste a ton of water? Not necessarily. Sometimes. It really depends. “We don’t have the real ground-truth numbers on data-center water use to put everyone on the same page,” Eric Masanet, a sustainability researcher at UC Santa Barbara who studies data centers, told me. Neither data-center operators nor utilities provide much insight; what public information exists can be contextualized, recontextualized, and distorted to suggest basically anything.[Read: Generative AI is an engineering disaster]Yet the water issue is tremendously consequential—not only for the well-being of residents in all of the counties where new data centers are popping up but also for the future development and regulation of AI itself. Just this week, when New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the nation’s first statewide data-center moratorium, her office cited the “massive amounts” of water that hyper-scale data centers could require. In a drought-stricken county or during a heat wave, a data center may seriously burden local water supplies. Where water is abundant and utilities can afford new infrastructure, data centers may pose little issue.Outside of water-stressed regions, “it’s not really a major concern for now,” Fengqi You, an energy-systems expert at Cornell, told me. “But as the sector grows, who knows?” Turning any particular case into a sweeping pronouncement produces little but heightened emotions… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago
- Anthropic Accidentally Made the Perfect CommercialIn an impressive challenge to the idea that no publicity is bad publicity, Anthropic is now promoting itself with images of disaster, death, and human suffering. The AI company’s latest ad, which debuted during a World Cup match last week, is a perplexing 90-second artifact. The commercial opens with footage of a house engulfed in flames and the crackling sound of burning wood. From there, a series of dark images—rows of gravestones in a cemetery, a homeless couple sleeping on the street, laborers working in a West African granite quarry—flashes across the screen. These stills are accompanied by a series of voice-overs: “Can AI be trusted?” “Who’s going to hit the brakes if we need to?” “How do we really ensure that what we’re aiming to achieve really does benefit the majority of people?” The questions are left unanswered.Halfway through, the ad moves from dystopian film trailer to feel-good corporate ad. We see a photo of a mother sitting beside her daughter as a voice speculates that AI will allow her to be a better mom. Later, a medical worker uses a laptop covered in Anthropic stickers. “Maybe it’ll cure some great things,” a man says. A nature montage plays—there’s a humpback whale, grassy hills, and people hugging.Finally, text flashes on the screen: “There’s hope in hard questions.” In the background, we see the ocean. And then Anthropic’s tagline: “Keep thinking.”The commercial is tone-deaf. It’s one thing to mention the possibility of hitting the brakes on AI progress; it’s another to overlay the question on an image of dead Americans. The video is also just confusing. Does Anthropic think that AI is going to set the world on fire and leave us jobless, or that its chatbot, Claude, will lead us to a more human future where we spend our days watching whales by the sea? The company’s answer seems to be: We don’t know. The video has been mocked, obviously. Some people likened it to hypothetical ads by oil companies professing concerns about the environment. The head of one tech-media company posted, “I actually like the tagline but we don’t need the shots of *checks notes* burning houses and graves!” Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Sam Altman—who has a self-interest in undercutting Anthropic—chimed in to call the ad “satire.”This is not the first time that a company has botched its advertising around AI: OpenAI has had its own share of embarrassing ads.… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago
- Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
As they scramble to keep their systems online, AI companies are making things expensive for the rest of us. Large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude are so resource-hungry that tech companies may be purchasing 70 percent of the world’s supply of high-end computer memory, causing a shortage. As a result, the prices of computer memory and storage are skyrocketing: Hard drives that I bought for my reporting two years ago for $350 each were $800 when I checked two weeks ago, and are now out of stock. The prices of some laptops have gone up as much as 50 percent, and low-cost computers are being hit the hardest. Affordable entry-level computers may “disappear by 2028” according to one forecast. And the memory shortage is expected to continue for years.The memory is being put into data centers, which tech firms are expanding at incredible speed. They are planning to multiply total U.S.-data-center capacity by a factor of eight over the next few years. The demand for electricity at these sites is already so great that some companies are repurposing jet engines to power them.The problem is not simply that AI is being deployed so widely or quickly. Other computer technologies have seen similarly massive growth without triggering such a large spike in electricity or a shortage of computer components: Video and music are now streamed around the globe, accounting for many terabytes of internet traffic daily; the smartphone boom required the manufacturing of billions of devices that are now transferring huge amounts of data; billions of household devices are also now part of the Internet of Things; and whole industries have moved their operations to cloud software, which is hosted not in the sky but in, yes, data centers.[Read: The $10,000 MacBook Pro is here]The problem with generative AI, in the industry’s own jargon, is that it does not scale. The cost of growing from, say, a thousand users to a million is a key factor that venture capitalists examine when they evaluate start-ups. They want to see that the cost of adding each new user decreases over time, so that the company can support millions of users and make increasing profits. This is achieved partly through the careful engineering of computer systems that can efficiently handle more users who want to post photos, hail Ubers, or stream music.With generative AI, the work of building efficient, scalable systems has… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago - It’s Not Just Annoying, It’s InescapableIf Julius Caesar had debuted this year, William Shakespeare might have been accused of writing it with AI. A certain suspicious rhetorical device appears again and again in the play. It’s in Act I, Scene ii: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” In Act III, Scene ii: “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.” And later in that same scene: “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”These famous lines include what has become perhaps the best-known tic of AI writing—a sentence that tells you what the subject isn’t as well as what it is: It’s not X; it’s Y. Once you start noticing the construction, you see it all over the place. In one version, the Y is additive: It focuses, intensifies, or expands on the X. An annual review by Citizens Financial Group reported that growth in its private-banking division was “not just a win for the private bank—it’s a win for the entire enterprise.” In another variant, the Y supplants the X as the preferred descriptor. “The target was never a man. The target was the truth,” Michael Flynn, a former Donald Trump adviser, wrote in a March X post.Then there are constructions like No A, no B, just C, which especially seem to crop up in AI-generated fiction. Lines such as “No bag, no things, no armor, just me” helped to fuel accusations of AI writing in the horror novel Shy Girl, which was pulled by its publisher this year. (The book’s author denied using AI to write it. Citizens Financial Group has previously said that its communications team “leverages the technology in a number of areas.” Flynn did not respond to a request for comment.)The prevalence of this device isn’t just anecdotal—it’s measurable. (Sorry.) Barron’s reported that its appearance in corporate communications more than quadrupled from 2023 to 2025. Researchers at Pangram, which makes an AI-detection tool, estimate that Not just X but Y sentences appear three times as often in AI writing as they do in human writing. Elyas Masrour, a founding engineer at Pangram, told me that all of the major chatbots—including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and various open-source models—rely on it to varying degrees.Many other well-known chatbot tells—such as the usage of delve—have come and gone as AI companies honed their models and worked out kinks. Last fall, ChatGPT became obsessed… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- America Is Drowning in SportsThis summer’s lineup of sporting events has been an embarrassment of riches. This morning, the No. 1 men’s tennis player in the world (Jannik Sinner) and the winningest men’s tennis player of all time (Novak Djokovic) played in the semifinal of the biggest tennis tournament in the world (Wimbledon). In the afternoon, Spain and Belgium are kicking off their World Cup quarterfinal match. If that wasn’t enough, the evening brings a full slate of Major League Baseball games, plus NBA Summer League debuts for half the league’s rookies. All of this comes after a packed June in which, at one point, the World Cup, the NBA finals, and the NHL finals all briefly overlapped.If it feels like there is more sports to watch than ever before, that’s because there is. This year’s World Cup is the biggest ever, the tournament having jumped from 32 teams to 48. It may come around only every four years, but the sports calendar no longer stops. The MLB, NHL, and NBA have all added games over the past few years. In 2020, the NFL tacked on two extra playoff games; the following year, the league added an extra regular-season game for the first time in nearly 50 years. Since then, it has colonized ever more calendar territory, rescheduling games from its standard Sunday slate to the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Day, and a number of late-season Saturdays. Every major league has expanded over the past few years, Stephen Master, an adjunct professor of sports media at NYU and the former global head of sports at Nielsen, told me: “There’s not a league that hasn’t been touched by it.” And while this isn’t the first time these leagues have grown, the recent across-the-board expansion surge is unusual, the experts I spoke with all said.If you’re a sports fan like me, more games to watch can seem like a good thing. You don’t get the tiny African island nation of Cape Verde holding out for a miraculous draw against the mighty Spain without a 48-team World Cup. When leagues expand their playoffs—as, say, the MLB did in 2022—they give more teams a chance to qualify and more fans something to root for. But the glut of games can also be overwhelming, even if you aren’t someone who binges three different leagues. There’s simply too much.The feeling of excess has to do in part with… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
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